Let’s take a look at the differences between customer support and customer success.

Purposes

The two have very slightly purposes within a company. Customer support is often thought to be reactive, responding to problems that customers reach out about, resolving issues, and keeping customers happy.

On the other hand, customer success is more proactive. Customer success agents aim to understand and anticipate customer needs in order to increase customer satisfaction and decrease churn. Customer success teams proactively reach out to customers, initiating conversations first.

Another way to distinguish the two is simply from the names. Customer support provides support to customers ad hoc (whenever customers reach out for support). Customer success is dedicated to the success of customers, so they identify needs and reach out to customers. It’s for this reason that onboarding typically falls under the domain of customer success. During onboarding, customer success agents ensure customers are educated about everything they need to know to successfully use the product or service..

Customer success is responsible for:

Customer support is responsible for:

Deepening customer relationships to foster loyalty

Improving processes to enhance the customer experience

Preemptively anticipating customer needs (i.e. up-selling)

Monitoring customer health and engagement

Reducing churn

Billing inquiries

Technical problems

Resolving issues that customers call in about

Turning bad experiences into positive ones

Ensuring customer satisfaction

Reducing churn

Interactions

Customer support interactions are initiated by the customer and are transactional, meaning they have a beginning and an end.

Interactions with customer success teams don’t necessarily have an end date. It’s an ongoing relationship over time that continues as long as the user is a customer.

Metrics

Because customer support and support teams have different functions, they have different metrics to look at.

Customer support metrics typically measure the quality and speed of the resolution, whereas customer success metrics are more concerned with the long-term business goals so they look at things such as the lifestyle value of the customer. Customer success works to prevent customer churn and uses indicators like product usage to identify and reach out to customers who are in danger of churning.

Customer success metrics include:

Customer support metrics include:

Customer churn rate

Expansion revenue

Customer retention

Repeat purchase rate

Customer lifetime value

Customer satisfaction (CSAT surveys)

Net promoter scores (NPS surveys)

Average resolution time

First response times

The rise of customer success

This idea of customer success was really only born in the last few years. Part of the reason that there was this need for customer success came from the rise of software as a service (SaaS) companies which made customer satisfaction and loyalty more crucial than ever. Enter customer success.

B2B companies saw the value of customer success teams as well. Companies across industries started to focus on nurturing existing customers and strengthening advocacy - this helped increase customer retention and loyalty over time.

Support and success needs to be complementary

In many companies, customer success and support often work in silos. While customer success and support have different functions, the two teams should work in tandem in a company because at the end of the day, both teams ultimately have the same end goal: providing the best experience possible for their shared customers.